llm/865675e4-e77e-406f-be46-99a2055fb034/0accb729-a55d-48e8-ab73-6a10340f3589-input.json
Summarize the following text in approximately 100 words. Focus on the main ideas and key points. Write in a clear, direct style. <text> NEW BOOK! Explore a better way to work – one that promises more calm, clarity, and creativity. LEARN MORE Skip to content Menu Menu Home Scholarship Writing Essays Press Contact Home » Blog » Why Didn’t AI “Join the Workforce” in 2025? Why Didn’t AI “Join the Workforce” in 2025? January 6, 2026 January 5, 2026 Exactly one year ago, Sam Altman made a bold prediction : “We believe that, in 2025, we may see the first AI agents ‘join the workforce’ and materially change the output of companies.” Soon after, OpenAI’s Chief Product Officer, Kevin Weil, elaborated on this claim when he stated in an interview that 2025 would be the year “that we go from ChatGPT being this super smart thing…to ChatGPT doing things in the real world for you.” He provided examples, such as filling out paperwork and booking hotel rooms. An Axios article covering Weil’s remarks provided a blunt summary: “2025 is the year of AI agents.” These claims mattered. A chatbot can summarize text or directly answer questions, but in theory, an agent can tackle much more complicated tasks that require multiple steps and decisions along the way. When Altman talked about these systems joining the workforce, he meant it. He envisioned a world in which you assign projects to an agent in the same way you might to a human employee. The often-predicted future in which AI dominates our lives requires something like agent technology to be realized. The industry had reason to be optimistic that 2025 would prove pivotal. In previous years, AI agents like Claude Code and OpenAI’s Codex had become impressively adept at tackling multi-step computer programming problems. It seemed natural that this same skill might easily generalize to other types of tasks. Mark Benioff, CEO of Salesforce, became so enthusiastic about these possibilities that early in 2025, he claimed that AI agents would imminently unleash a “digital labor revolution” worth trillions of dollars. But here’s the thing: none of that ended up happening. As I report in my most recent New Yorker article, titled “Why A.I. Didn’t Transform Our Lives in 2025,” AI agents failed to live up to their hype. We didn’t end up with the equivalent of Claude Code or Codex for other types of work. And the products that were released, such as ChatGPT Agent, fell laughably short of being ready to take over major parts of our jobs. (In one example I cite in my article, ChatGPT Agent spends fourteen minutes futilely trying to select a value from a drop-down menu on a real estate website.) Silicon Valley skeptic Gary Marcus told me that the underlying technology powering these agents – the same large language models used by chatbots – would never be capable of delivering on these promises. “They’re building clumsy tools on top of clumsy tools,” he said. OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy implicitly agreed when he said, during a recent appearance on the Dwarkesh Podcast , that there had been “overpredictions going on in the industry,” before then adding: “In my mind, this is really a lot more accurately described as the Decade of the Agent.” Which is all to say, we actually don’t know how to build the digital employees that we were told would start arriving in 2025. To find out more about why 2025 failed to become the Year of the AI Agent, I recommend reading my full New Yorker piece . But for now, I want to emphasize a broader point: I’m hoping 2026 will be the year we stop caring about what people believe AI might do, and instead start reacting to its real, present capabilities. For example, last week, Sal Khan wrote a New York Times op-ed in which he said, “I believe artificial intelligence will displace workers at a scale many people don’t yet realize.” The standard reaction would be to fret about this scary possibility. But what if we instead responded: says who? The actual examples Khan provides, which include someone telling him that A.I. agents are “capable” of replacing 80% of his call center employees, or Waymo’s incredibly slow and costly process of hand-mapping cities to deploy self-driving cars, are hardly harbingers of general economic devastation. So, this is how I’m thinking about AI in 2026. Enough of the predictions . I’m done reacting to hypotheticals propped up by vibes. The impacts of the technologies that already exist are already more than enough to concern us for now… On Paperbacks and TikTok 6 thoughts on “Why Didn’t AI “Join the Workforce” in 2025?” Daniel Poulin January 5, 2026 at 1:22 pm It is normal to make incredible predictions about Ai capabilities. The only goal about them is to attract new investors or to get more money from them. Their predictions are based like promises from politicians : everybody knows they are lying, but they also want to believe them too. As long AI creators can sell dreams, money will flow… Reply l_oink January 5, 2026 at 4:02 pm Can we talk about the impacts that AI is having in education? I am in undergrad and I know people that have not written an essay or a report since 2023. AI does. Reply Jay January 5, 2026 at 7:44 pm I’m a dev who works on actually integrating ai into software Ai models used as a standard development tool can help make much better and smarter software! But not magic. It’s really easy to theorize a step too far when you’re thinking about what ai can do. Just because ai can reason in a loop does not mean it can solve every problem ever. It means devs have a new task where they have to develop and debug loops and pray that loops actually do useful things. And sometimes they do and sometimes they don’t. I think ai is SUPER USEFUL and is revamping how we make software and what software we make. Huge leap forward and the industry has genuinely changed. All the stuff I do now is almost completely different than a few years ago. Progress, yay! But all of our current ai capabilities are perfectly useful already and there’s no need to build ai datacenter death stars in order to reach an ai singularity. We just need more time to use ai tools thoughtfully for better software. And it’s a great time to do that because now easy software is quite easy to make, and difficult software is more accessible to make than ever! Reply Galia January 6, 2026 at 6:06 am I agree with this article. Right now, AI certainly accelerates productivity, but I don’t see agents replacing humans in 2026. I always believed that AI was one source among others for solving problems, not to be ignored, but not to be magnified to the point of forgetting all the other sources available. Reply convexer.name January 6, 2026 at 7:58 am I’m reminded of the quip about “I want an AI to do my laundry and wash my dishes so I can focus on making art and writing, and I’ve been given the precise opposite.” I think the world we got can be explained by market forces. Building something like Codex is probably easier than building a freeform browser agent that can order airplane tickets and negotiate real estate prices (much less structure in these problems). Moreover, the freeform browser agent (or whatever we are calling it now) primarily benefits *consumers* and low-level employees, whereas Codex benefits executives by providing (perceived) efficiency across the board (you can actually lay people off). So, if you’re going to start an AI company, you’ll see better risk/reward with a coding agent than with a dishwashing agent. I don’t know if it’s good news or not, but perhaps the low-hanging fruit has been picked now, and in 2026 we will start to see some of these more useful agents for consumer use. But whatever utility is gained there will surely be offset by the introduction of product placement/ads into the popular AI chatbots; it’s only a matter of time. Reply TC January 6, 2026 at 8:06 am The father of AI John McCarthy: “I invented the term artificial intelligence because I wanted more money for a summer study at Dartmuth.” Keywords used: “Invented” “Term” “For” “Money” It’s all hype, and reality is about to set in. Reply Leave a Comment Cancel reply Comment Name Email Website Save my name, email, and website in this browser for the next time I comment. About Cal launched the "Study Hacks" blog at calnewport.com in 2007, and has been regularly publishing essays here ever since. Over 2,000,000 people a year visit this site to read Cal's weekly posts about technology, productivity, and the quest to live and work deeply in an increasingly distracted world, while tens of thousands more subscribe to have these essays delivered directly to their inbox (see the sign-up form below). To read more, you can browse more than 15 years of past essays in the archive . In the fall of 2022, Cal launched a new portal, TheDeepLife.com , to serve as the online home for all other content relevant to the deep life movement he helped initiate. Here you can find all past episodes of Cal's popular podcast, Deep Questions , and explore an extensive library of original videos. This site is the online home for the computer science professor and bestselling author Cal Newport. Here you can learn more about Cal and both his general-audience and academic writing. You can also browse and subscribe to his long-running weekly essay series. For more on Cal's podcast, videos, and online courses, please visit his media portal, TheDeepLife.com Contact Info Academic Communication cn248@georgetown.edu Media Inquires calnewport@penguinrandomhouse.com All Other Requests See Contact Page Quick Links Scholarship Writing Essays Press Contact Media Kit Podcast/Videos Privacy Policies Cookie Policy Terms of Service Accessibility Statement Copyright © 2026 Cal Newport, All rights reserved. </text> Write only the summary, with no preamble or additional commentary.